Now comes a way to send kisses. If you’re thinking we’d already got this sussed with the xxx at the end of the email, you’re just far too conventional, a campaign from Google in conjunction with makeup specialists Burberry takes things to a whole new level and lets you send messages, sealed with your own loving kiss.

The idea behind the new campaign is that you visit kisses.burberry.com then simply “pucker up in front of your webcam”. The site uses “unique kiss-detection technology” to detect the outline of your actual lips, and you can then choose to dress up the lips with a Burberry lipstick color.

If you’re using a touch screen mobile or tablet, you can actually kiss your screen (oh how unhygienic!) and your lip outline will be taken from there. All you have to do after this is to write a message to accompany the kiss, then send it to someone from your Google+ friends list or via email - and spend a few hours sanitising your device.

You’re shown the envelope with your message fly from your city to the receiver’s destination across a 3D landscape. The receiver gets an email, from which they can see the same journey, read your message and hopefully respond with a kiss of their own.

It seems to be both a way to advertise lipstick and a ploy to get you to install a webcam and Chrome - but I imagine it will still catch on. Look at the world map of kisses it has, and is, delivering to see its popularity spread.

We did wonder if this was a good idea for Father’s Day, but on the whole thought most fathers would be unsure about getting lipstick kisses via email – particularly from their sons. Probably best to go for the ‘no lipstick’ option if you’re in this category.